Decades of legal segregation shape Rochester city schools today

The black population in Rochester was statistically insignificant until the mid-20th century.

Rochester was one of many cities to experience race riots in the 1960s.

In 2018, only 10 percent of RCSD students are white, including those of Middle Eastern descent.

Segregation in Monroe County, both educational and residential, did not happen by accident.

Racially isolated schools were once the law in the city. In 1841, the school board asked state Education Commissioner John Spencer whether it must allow black children into its common schools.

"The admission of colored children is in many places so odious, that whites will not attend," he responded. "In such cases the trustees would be justified in excluding them, and furnishing them a separate room."

The "colored school" was in operation until 1856, when the building landlord raised the rent and the board decided it could no longer afford the luxury of a segregated system.

The black population in Rochester was statistically insignificant until the mid-20th century, when waves of black migrant workers from the Orlando, Florida, area and elsewhere came north, first to work on Wayne County farms then eventually to settle in southwest and northeast Rochester.

They were greeted immediately by restrictive real estate practices, instigated and subsidized by the federal government, that kept them hemmed into a few neighborhoods as resources were systematically withdrawn. One black neighborhood that did flourish, Clarissa Street in the Third Ward, was demolished in favor of a highway that made it easier for white workers to commute to their new homes in the suburbs.

Rochester was one of many cities to experience race riots in the 1960s, and also a series of lawsuits and proposals intending to desegregate its schools. Those came at a time when the majority of RCSD students were still white.

In 1970-71, after a series of studies and intense controversy, the district implemented a busing program intended to reduce segregation in what was still a fairly racially balanced city.

Instead, Rochester saw the same thing that year as many other northern cities — line brawls between black and white students that closed down high schools and accelerated the pace of white families fleeing for the suburbs.

At one of the last such incidents, in June 1971, about 1,000 young people gathered along Lake Avenue near Charlotte High School, whites on one side and blacks on the other, while police stood in the road and tried to keep the peace.

"Some youths brandished tree limbs, tire irons and leather belts," the Democrat and Chronicle reported. "Another had a baseball bat." A 15-year-old needed 16 stitches to close a gash on his face and four teachers had their windshields smashed.

"The exuberance this year was greater than usual," Assistant Superintendent Eugene Conant said. The integration effort was abandoned by the fall.

Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked whether desegregation in Detroit was constrained by the city's boundaries; that is, whether courts could devise integration solutions across district boundaries. Their answer, in the case Milliken v. Bradley, was no.

That decision, more than any other, clinched the isolation of black and brown children in Detroit, Rochester and other cities across the North.

In 1963, for example, RCSD had commissioned a report in response to a troubling trend toward segregation in schools. It found that while 78 percent of its students were white, several elementary schools had more than 50 percent non-white children.

Fifty-five years later, only 10 percent of RCSD students are white, including those of Middle Eastern descent. Only one school, Francis Parker School 23 in the Park Avenue neighborhood, has more than 30 percent white students.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, the victorious attorney in Brown v. Board of Education, was a justice on the court by the time of Milliken v. Bradley.

He wrote in dissent to that decision: "In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities — one white, the other black — but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret."

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